Some Design agencies are publishing a little summary of their activities during the last week. Among a few of them, there are Berg, Stamen (is trying). It is an interesting idea which requires a strong commitment and needs to be done quickly to not be a burden. The ideal way of doing it would be on Friday evenings. It might be difficult, Friday evenings are sometimes a run for closing some projects, or we might be tired with no energy left.
Another issue is that these agencies are small. It’s a lot easier to write a summary with a human touch. Pheromone has around 60 employees. This blog has been opened to talk about what matters to individual people in Pheromone, not a place for PR speak (which I have a tad difficulty with). I encourage Pherotizens to write their own. So I’ll try to keep it close to what happened around me last week in the agency and being careful about things which are confidential. Let’s start with So Last Week in memory of Celine who’s doing cool UX stuff in Montreal.
- Sharing data is a growing question in Pheromone. Pheromone is working for clients. Then the agency is not working with its own data. There is a fear of sharing data very similar to the fear of sharing information at the beginning of the Web. Having a good business case for sharing data is something, I start to think about.
- RDS has created Le Grand Club, a social network around sport (mostly hockey). Each member has a profile page which gives information about its community. RDS asked us to expose these data in a more machine processable way. FOAF is exactly the right way of doing that. Rounds of implementations and small fixes were done, but nothing is better than going through #swig channel to test it. I received feedbacks from Dan Brickley and Toby Inkster.
- Big coordination work on in-house mobile app for Montrealers which you should be getting news this week. Stay tuned.
- The week was short because of Canada Day. Less people at the agency on Friday, and it was easier to work on some stuff.
- My paper on Opacity has been accepted at the W3C Workshop on Privacy for Advanced Web APIs in London, UK. I have prepared my trip to go there. I still have to write a blog post about it to give more details. But in the meantime, I discovered a talk closely related to my own notion of opacity: The Real Life Social Network by Paul Adams. It is a must read.
- I have been doing an accessibility review of one of our client sites and I relate strongly with what Elie Sloïm explained in his OpenWeb article about l’accessibilité agile. Accessibility reviews are usually too late and gives a lot of frustration to the project manager, the developers, and most of the time the client. It is a lot better to think with UX and designers accessibility upfront at the beginning of the project but this requires a full control of the project at the beginning or that the work being done on concepts and designs are “accessibility proofed”, in the case for example of work between agencies with a client.
Ok, let’s call it a try. We will see what happens for this week if I continue the So Last Week.